Learning Across Sites: New tools, infrastructures and practices - Earli

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Computer- supported collaborating 157
as CSCL. In particular, some settings may be more resilient than others. They may
be more cautious in responding to any such implications for change.
Here I shall consider these matters as they relate to CSCL in typical higher education:
that is, full- time, post- secondary students living in or around a campus. I
shall argue that innovations associated with the emergence of CSCL have proved
particularly challenging to implement in higher education. Yet more recent lines of
thinking about the management of collaboration may now offer greater promise.
I illustrate this promise with two modest interventions of my own: examples that
suggest at least the spirit of what might be possible in supporting collaboration.
The chapter is organised as follows. The first section sketches theoretical influences
that have consistently framed CSCL. This reminds us of the ambitions for
successful CSCL- led innovation in universities. I then turn from theory to practice.
The three following sections address contrasting designs for implementing
computer- supported collaboration, considering the status and fate of each in higher
education. I argue that the third of these designs represents the most useful way
forward. However, promoting it needs to be properly theorised and this requires
a final section of the chapter. This will consider more deeply the very nature of
collaboration as an experience of learning. So, in effect, this fifth section comes full
circle to revisit theory, considering again the psychological basis of collaborative
configurations for learning.
Theoretical influences of and on CSCL research
Much research in CSCL continues to pitch its analyses at the level of individual
learners: characterising their agency and outcomes, somewhat decoupled from
broader social and institutional contexts. Yet a significant core of CSCL research
has tracked a shifting conceptual climate in cognitive and developmental psychology
that contrasts with this individuated approach. This shift might be termed
an ‘enculturing’ of cognition (Cole, 1996; Shore, 1996; Shweder, 1991; Lave &
Wenger, 1991; Wertsch, 1991). Partly, this requires seeing cognition as inherently
shaped by the particular ‘designs for living’ – the culture – in which each
individual finds themselves. More especially, it requires theorising cognition as
‘distributed’ across the material, symbolic, and social resources available in that
specific cultural niche (Donald, 1993; Hutchins, 1991). Mind, being constituted
through its relations with such resources, is no longer best studied by considering
the individual actor in isolation. Cognition is not to be theorised as some processes
circumscribed by the skull.
This implicit prescription about how we best study cognition is the important
one for an enculturing perspective. By insisting that cognition is actually constituted
within culture, this theoretical tradition requires that any occasion of thinking or
learning is studied only and always with careful attention to its context. Problemsolving
is studied as something realised through engagements with particular
worlds at particular moments.
The practice of CSCL squares up nicely with a cultural theory of cognition.